CHAPTER XX

A week Jerry spent in the bush, deterred always from penetrating
to the mountains by the bushmen who ever guarded the runways.
And it would have gone hard with him in the matter of food, had he not,
on the second day, encountered a lone small pig, evidently lost from
its litter. It was his first hunting adventure for a living, and
it prevented him from travelling farther, for, true to his instinct,
he remained by his kill until it was nearly devoured.

True, he ranged widely about the neighbourhood, finding no other
food he could capture. But always, until it was gone, he returned
to the slain pig. Yet he was not happy in his freedom. He
was too domesticated, too civilized. Too many thousands of years
had elapsed since his ancestors had run freely wild. He was lonely.
He could not get along without man. Too long had he, and the generations
before him, lived in intimate relationship with the two-legged gods.
Too long had his kind loved man, served him for love, endured for love,
died for love, and, in return, been partly appreciated, less understood,
and roughly loved.

So great was Jerry’s loneliness that even a two-legged black-god
was desirable, since white-gods had long since faded into the limbo
of the past. For all he might have known, had he been capable
of conjecturing, the only white-gods in existence had perished.
Acting on the assumption that a black-god was better than no god, when
he had quite finished the little pig, he deflected his course to the
left, down-hill, toward the sea. He did this, again without reasoning,
merely because, in the subtle processes of his brain, experience worked.
His experience had been to live always close by the sea; humans he had
always encountered close by the sea; and down-hill had invariably led
to the sea.

He came out upon the shore of the reef-sheltered lagoon where ruined
grass houses told him men had lived. The jungle ran riot through
the place. Six-inch trees, throated with rotten remnants of thatched
roofs through which they had aspired toward the sun, rose about him.
Quick-growing trees had shadowed the kingposts so that the idols and
totems, seated in carved shark jaws, grinned greenly and monstrously
at the futility of man through a rime of moss and mottled fungus.
A poor little sea-wall, never much at its best, sprawled in ruin from
the coconut roots to the placid sea. Bananas, plantains, and breadfruit
lay rotting on the ground. Bones lay about, human bones, and Jerry
nosed them out, knowing them for what they were, emblems of the nothingness
of life. Skulls he did not encounter, for the skulls that belonged
to the scattered bones ornamented the devil devil houses in the upland
bush villages.

The salt tang of the sea gladdened his nostrils, and he snorted with
the pleasure of the stench of the mangrove swamp. But, another
Crusoe chancing upon the footprint of another man Friday, his nose,
not his eyes, shocked him electrically alert as he smelled the fresh
contact of a living man’s foot with the ground. It was a
nigger’s foot, but it was alive, it was immediate; and, as he
traced it a score of yards, he came upon another foot-scent, indubitably
a white man’s.

Had there been an onlooker, he would have thought Jerry had gone
suddenly mad. He rushed frantically about, turning and twisting
his course, now his nose to the ground, now up in the air, whining as
frantically as he rushed, leaping abruptly at right angles as new scents
reached him, scurrying here and there and everywhere as if in a game
of tag with some invisible playfellow.

But he was reading the full report which many men had written on
the ground. A white man had been there, he learned, and a number
of blacks. Here a black had climbed a coconut tree and cast down
the nuts. There a banana tree had been despoiled of its clustered
fruit; and, beyond, it was evident that a similar event had happened
to a breadfruit tree. One thing, however, puzzled him—a
scent new to him that was neither black man’s nor white man’s.
Had he had the necessary knowledge and the wit of eye-observance, he
would have noted that the footprint was smaller than a man’s and
that the toeprints were different from a Mary’s in that they were
close together and did not press deeply into the earth. What bothered
him in his smelling was his ignorance of talcum powder. Pungent
it was in his nostrils, but never, since first he had smelled out the
footprints of man, had he encountered such a scent. And with this
were combined other and fainter scents that were equally strange to
him.

Not long did he interest himself in such mystery. A white man’s
footprints he had smelled, and through the maze of all the other prints
he followed the one print down through a breach of sea-wall to the sea-pounded
coral sand lapped by the sea. Here the latest freshness of many
feet drew together where the nose of a boat had rested on the beach
and where men had disembarked and embarked again. He smelled up
all the story, and, his forelegs in the water till it touched his shoulders,
he gazed out across the lagoon where the disappearing trail was lost
to his nose.

Had he been half an hour sooner he would have seen a boat, without
oars, gasoline-propelled, shooting across the quiet water. What
he did see was an Arangi. True, it was far larger than
the Arangi he had known, but it was white, it was long, it had
masts, and it floated on the surface of the sea. It had three
masts, sky-lofty and all of a size; but his observation was not trained
to note the difference between them and the one long and the one short
mast of the Arangi. The one floating world he had known
was the white-painted Arangi. And, since, without a quiver
of doubt, this was the Arangi, then, on board, would be his beloved
Skipper. If Arangis could resurrect, then could Skippers
resurrect, and in utter faith that the head of nothingness he had last
seen on Bashti’s knees he would find again rejoined to its body
and its two legs on the deck of the white-painted floating world, he
waded out to his depth, and, swimming dared the sea.

He greatly dared, for in venturing the water he broke one of the
greatest and earliest taboos he had learned. In his vocabulary
was no word for “crocodile”; yet in his thought, as potent
as any utterable word, was an image of dreadful import—an image
of a log awash that was not a log and that was alive, that could swim
upon the surface, under the surface, and haul out across the dry land,
that was huge-toothed, mighty-mawed, and certain death to a swimming
dog.

But he continued the breaking of the taboo without fear. Unlike
a man who can be simultaneously conscious of two states of mind, and
who, swimming, would have known both the fear and the high courage with
which he overrode the fear, Jerry, as he swam, knew only one state of
mind, which was that he was swimming to the Arangi and to Skipper.
At the moment preceding the first stroke of his paws in the water out
of his depth, he had known all the terribleness of the taboo he deliberately
broke. But, launched out, the decision made, the line of least
resistance taken, he knew, single-thoughted, single-hearted, only that
he was going to Skipper.

Little practised as he was in swimming, he swam with all his strength,
whimpering in a sort of chant his eager love for Skipper who indubitably
must be aboard the white yacht half a mile away. His little song
of love, fraught with keenness of anxiety, came to the ears of a man
and woman lounging in deck-chairs under the awning; and it was the quick-eyed
woman who first saw the golden head of Jerry and cried out what she
saw.

“Lower a boat, Husband-Man,” she commanded. “It’s
a little dog. He mustn’t drown.”

“Dogs don’t drown that easily,” was “Husband-Man’s”
reply. “He’ll make it all right. But what under
the sun a dog’s doing out here . . . ” He lifted his
marine glasses to his eyes and stared a moment. “And a white
man’s dog at that!”

Jerry beat the water with his paws and moved steadily along, straining
his eyes at the growing yacht until suddenly warned by a sensing of
immediate danger. The taboo smote him. This that moved toward
him was the log awash that was not a log but a live thing of peril.
Part of it he saw above the surface moving sluggishly, and ere that
projecting part sank, he had an awareness that somehow it was different
from a log awash.

Next, something brushed past him, and he encountered it with a snarl
and a splashing of his forepaws. He was half-whirled about in
the vortex of the thing’s passage caused by the alarmed flirt
of its tail. Shark it was, and not crocodile, and not so timidly
would it have sheered clear but for the fact that it was fairly full
with a recent feed of a huge sea turtle too feeble with age to escape.

Although he could not see it, Jerry sensed that the thing, the instrument
of nothingness, lurked about him. Nor did he see the dorsal fin
break surface and approach him from the rear. From the yacht he
heard rifle-shots in quick succession. From the rear a panic splash
came to his ears. That was all. The peril passed and was
forgotten. Nor did he connect the rifle-shots with the passing
of the peril. He did not know, and he was never to know, that
one, known to men as Harley Kennan, but known as “Husband-Man”
by the woman he called “Wife-Woman,” who owned the three-topmast
schooner yacht Ariel, had saved his life by sending a thirty-thirty
Marlin bullet through the base of a shark’s fin.

But Jerry was to know Harley Kennan, and quickly, for it was Harley
Kennan, a bowline around his body under his arm-pits, lowered by a couple
of seamen down the generous freeboard of the Ariel, who gathered
in by the nape of the neck the smooth-coated Irish terrier that, treading
water perpendicularly, had no eyes for him so eagerly did he gaze at
the line of faces along the rail in quest of the one face.

No pause for thanks did he make when he was dropped down upon the
deck. Instead, shaking himself instinctively as he ran, he scurried
along the deck for Skipper. The man and his wife laughed at the
spectacle.

“He acts as if he were demented with delight at being rescued,”
Mrs. Kennan observed.

And Mr. Kennan: “It’s not that. He must have a
screw loose somewhere. Perhaps he’s one of those creatures
who’ve slipped the ratchet off the motion cog. Maybe he
can’t stop running till he runs down.”

In the meantime Jerry continued to run, up port side and down starboard
side, from stern to bow and back again, wagging his stump tail and laughing
friendliness to the many two-legged gods he encountered. Had he
been able to think to such abstraction he would have been astounded
at the number of white-gods. Thirty there were at least of them,
not counting other gods that were neither black nor white, but that
still, two-legged, upright and garmented, were beyond all peradventure
gods. Likewise, had he been capable of such generalization, he
would have decided that the white-gods had not yet all of them passed
into the nothingness. As it was, he realized all this without
being aware that he realized it.

But there was no Skipper. He sniffed down the forecastle hatch,
sniffed into the galley where two Chinese cooks jabbered unintelligibly
to him, sniffed down the cabin companionway, sniffed down the engine-room
skylight and for the first time knew gasoline and engine oil; but sniff
as he would, wherever he ran, no scent did he catch of Skipper.

Aft, at the wheel, he would have sat down and howled his heartbreak
of disappointment, had not a white-god, evidently of command, in gold-decorated
white duck cap and uniform, spoken to him. Instantly, always a
gentleman, Jerry smiled with flattened ears of courtesy, wagged his
tail, and approached. The hand of this high god had almost caressed
his head when the woman’s voice came down the deck in speech that
Jerry did not understand. The words and terms of it were beyond
him. But he sensed power of command in it, which was verified
by the quick withdrawal of the hand of the god in white and gold who
had almost caressed him. This god, stiffened electrically and
pointed Jerry along the deck, and, with mouth encouragements and urgings
the import of which Jerry could only guess, directed him toward the
one who so commanded by saying:

“Send him, please, along to me, Captain Winters.”

Jerry wriggled his body in delight of obeying, and would loyally
have presented his head to her outreaching caress of hand, had not the
strangeness and difference of her deterred him. He broke off in
mid-approach and with a show of teeth snarled himself back and away
from the windblown skirt of her. The only human females he had
known were naked Marys. This skirt, flapping in the wind like
a sail, reminded him of the menacing mainsail of the Arangi when
it had jarred and crashed and swooped above his head. The noises
her mouth made were gentle and ingratiating, but the fearsome skirt
still flapped in the breeze.

“You ridiculous dog!” she laughed. “I’m
not going to bite you.”

But her husband thrust out a rough, sure hand and drew Jerry in to
him. And Jerry wriggled in ecstasy under the god’s caress,
kissing the hand with a red flicker of tongue. Next, Harley Kennan
directed him toward the woman sitting up in the deck-chair and bending
forward, with hovering hands of greeting. Jerry obeyed.
He advanced with flattened ears and laughing mouth: but, just ere she
could touch him, the wind fluttered the skirt again and he backed away
with a snarl.

“It’s not you that he’s afraid of, Villa,”
he said. “But of your skirt. Perhaps he’s never
seen a skirt before.”

“You mean,” Villa Kennan challenged, “that these
head-hunting cannibals ashore here keep records of pedigrees and maintain
kennels; for surely this absurd adventurer of a dog is as proper an
Irish terrier as the Ariel is an Oregon-pine-planked schooner.”

Harley Kennan laughed in acknowledgment. Villa Kennan laughed
too; and Jerry knew that these were a pair of happy gods, and himself
laughed with them.

Of his own initiative, he approached the lady god again, attracted
by the talcum powder and other minor fragrances he had already identified
as the strange scents encountered on the beach. But the unfortunate
trade wind again fluttered her skirt, and again he backed away—not
so far, this time, with much less of a bristle of his neck and shoulder
hair, and with no more of a snarl than a mere half-baring of his fangs.

“He’s afraid of your skirt,” Harley insisted.
“Look at him! He wants to come to you, but the skirt keeps
him away. Tuck it under you so that it won’t flutter, and
see what happens.”

Villa Kennan carried out the suggestion, and Jerry came circumspectly,
bent his head to her hand and writhed his back under it, the while he
sniffed her feet, stocking-clad and shoe-covered, and knew them as the
feet which had trod uncovered the ruined ways of the village ashore.

“No doubt of it,” Harley agreed. “He’s
white-man selected, white-man bred and born. He has a history.
He knows adventure from the ground-roots up. If he could tell
his story, we’d sit listening entranced for days. Depend
on it, he’s not known blacks all his life. Let’s try
him on Johnny.”

Johnny, whom Kennan beckoned up to him, was a loan from the Resident
Commissioner of the British Solomons at Tulagi, who had come along as
pilot and guide to Kennan rather than as philosopher and friend.
Johnny approached grinning, and Jerry’s demeanour immediately
changed. His body stiffened under Villa Kennan’s hand as
he drew away from her and stalked stiff-legged to the black. Jerry’s
ears did not flatten, nor did he laugh fellowship with his mouth, as
he inspected Johnny and smelt his calves for future reference.
Cavalier he was to the extreme, and, after the briefest of inspection,
he turned back to Villa Kennan.

“What did I say?” her husband exulted. “He
knows the colour line. He’s a white man’s dog that
has been trained to it.”

“Of course,” he cried. “The Commissioner
told me all about it. The Arangi, that the Somo people
captured, sailed last from Meringe Plantation. Johnny recognizes
the dog as the same breed as the pair Haggin, of Meringe, must possess.
But that was a long time ago. He must have been a little puppy.
Of course he’s a white man’s dog.”

“I salute you, Mrs. S. Holmes,” her husband acknowledged
gallantly. “And all that remains is for you to lead me directly
to the head of La Perouse himself. The sailing directions record
that he left it somewhere in these islands.”

Little did they guess that Jerry had lived on intimate terms with
one Bashti, not many miles away along the shore, who, in Somo, at that
very moment, sat in his grass house pondering over a head on his withered
knees that had once been the head of the great navigator, the history
of which had been forgotten by the sons of the chief who had taken it.